I have two towers that I want to consolidate into one. One has W2K, one has Windows XP, and I need to keep both, for the software I use. Can I simply slave the XP drive to the W2K drive? (Ironically, the W2K tower has better hardware all around, and I want to ADD the XP drive to it.) I could re-install either OS if I need to. And, will any software be available to either drive? Thank you for your help!

Yes you can slave the XP hard drive into the W2K PC, BUT XP will need a Repair Install and may not Validate (depends on version), after this you will need to Repair the W2K Boot Loader. You can share data, but any software must be installed to each O/S. I honestly can not see the point any software which runs natively on W2K will run on XP. W2K is NT5 and XP is NT 5.1...............

The easiest way is, if you can switch the boot drives in BIOS. In that case, either W2K or WinXP drive becomes drive C. When WinXP drive is drive C, you have to run a repair installation, as MWCC stated. The software installed on the W2K drive will not run on WinXP and vise versa. That's because the registry entries, made by the software is missing in each other windows version. But you can access the data on each other drive. Please send a reply, if you solved the problem !!!

Thanks to MWCC, and to paulsep! I now see that, since the various software will be compatible with XP, that what I really need is to simply use XP, but I don't have all of my installation discs. Everything is legit, but the discs were destroyed. Is there a way to move the installs, once the drives are slaved? I know what the registry is, but have very little experience with it... Thank you both!

Sorry guys, I forgot to mention that I DO have the XP install discs and some of my others... I'd only need to move about six programs; everything else would be fine.

I guess, it's impossible to find all the necessary registry entries for the programs, you'd like to move. Another thing is, the programs might have copied some DLLs to the system32 folder within the windows folder, that are missing when you try to move the program without using the installation routine. If all the programs are legal, you should have the registration code, that is mostly used during the installation. You may also ask the software distributor for a new installation CD of the program. Please send a reply, if you solved the problem !!!

Paulsep, I hadn't thought of getting replacement discs. Seems painfully obvious now that you say it... I thought the registry would quickly get too complicated for me to get everything right; thanks for confirming that. I'm going to get new discs, use only XP, and slave the older drive. Especially since I am clearly not an advanced tech, I appreciate your help.